Dumbing Down the SAT Bodes Poorly for Education (bloomberg.com) 114
The SAT is billed as "a great way to find out how prepared students are for college." If that's true, recent changes to its format offer an unflattering assessment of the country's aspiring scholars, Bloomberg's editorial board wrote Wednesday. From the piece: [...] Then the pandemic hit. As in-person exams became impractical, hundreds of schools dropped their testing requirements. The SAT and its main competitor, the ACT, lost millions of dollars in revenue. Although both recently started offering digital options, schools have been slow to reinstate their requirements. Today, more than 80% of schools remain test-optional.
"If students are deciding to take a test," as one College Board executive put it, "how do we make the SAT the one they want to take?" To anyone familiar with American teenagers, the company's answer should come as no surprise: Make the test easier. The newly digitized format allows a calculator for the entire math section and drastically cuts reading comprehension. Gone are the 500- to 750-word passages about which students would answer a series of questions. Instead, test takers read 25- to 150-word excerpts -- about the length of a social media post -- and answer a single question about each.
[...] An effort by the College Board to reemphasize the benefits of deep reading -- for critical thinking, for self-reflection, for learning of all kinds -- might go a long way toward restoring some balance. It should build on efforts to incorporate college prep into school curricula, work with districts to develop coursework that builds reading stamina for all test takers, and consider reducing the cost of its subject-specific Advanced Placement exams that continue to test these skills (now $99), in line with the SAT ($68). Schools, for their part, should recommit to teaching books in their entirety.
"If students are deciding to take a test," as one College Board executive put it, "how do we make the SAT the one they want to take?" To anyone familiar with American teenagers, the company's answer should come as no surprise: Make the test easier. The newly digitized format allows a calculator for the entire math section and drastically cuts reading comprehension. Gone are the 500- to 750-word passages about which students would answer a series of questions. Instead, test takers read 25- to 150-word excerpts -- about the length of a social media post -- and answer a single question about each.
[...] An effort by the College Board to reemphasize the benefits of deep reading -- for critical thinking, for self-reflection, for learning of all kinds -- might go a long way toward restoring some balance. It should build on efforts to incorporate college prep into school curricula, work with districts to develop coursework that builds reading stamina for all test takers, and consider reducing the cost of its subject-specific Advanced Placement exams that continue to test these skills (now $99), in line with the SAT ($68). Schools, for their part, should recommit to teaching books in their entirety.
Lowering the Bar. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, we've been lowering the education bar since well before it was officially codified with "No Child Left Behind." Why wouldn't we also lower the bar on SATs? It's not like any of this shit matters so long as the cog mills can churn out corporate fodder perfectly suited to sit at a desk and make busy work while the AIs take over the actual work. Or, at least, that must be the vision at this point, since the country has collectively decided that actual education no longer matters, and critical thinking is some form of disease to be wiped out along with empathy.
Re:Lowering the Bar. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: Lowering the Bar. (Score:2)
I think they're saying the opposite; the difficulty of tests may have risen to challenge people that are good at taking tests.
Checks out, look at what's happened to software dev job interviews.
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They're lowering testing standards because of people who do well on tests? Really?
Just because you can take a test doesn't mean you are remotely ready for college. I've seen plenty of people who were trained to take a test that are so unprepared for college it isn't even a joke. One of the most devastating things we've done to high schoolers is teaching to the test instead of teaching them critical thinking. Of course teaching critical thinking is more difficult, and a classical education can be ruinously destructive to the status quo. As George Carlin noted in his "I used to be Irish C
Re: Lowering the Bar. (Score:3)
The City of Baltimore, in 2024, had 10% of students were proficient in math... that means 90% of graduating seniors can't do math at the 12th grade level.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/... [foxbaltimore.com]
Does dropping admission standards/simplifying testing really seem like it helps?
As stated in TFS, the reason for simplifying the SAT is to increase sales, it's not about better preparing students to determine their college readiness.
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Or, at least, that must be the vision at this point, since the country has collectively decided that actual education no longer matters,
Have we decided that, or just realized it? College degrees have had little to do with success in a profession for a long, long time.
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What are you using to measure that? Can't be money, college graduates earn more. Can't be heath, graduates live longer and report better health. Can't be happiness, they also report being happier. Even success in the NFL correlates with college degrees.
Re:Lowering the Bar. (Score:4, Interesting)
There's more to going to college than the degree. Contacts made are of considerable value, but there are other ways to making those contacts, especially if your family is wealthy (and if you family is wealthy, you're far more likely to be accepted to a college where you make those kinds of contacts).
People with more money live longer. Duh.
Happiness also correlates strongly with more money.
And the NFL gets most of its athletes from . . . wait for it . . . college teams, which spend a lot of time and effort to recruit the best high school players (and let's not forget the stereotype of the college athlete who has their hand held throughout their academic career to keep their grades passing, often with deliberate collusion on the part of their professors, because they are academically useless - and how many highly successful pros end up destitute shortly after they retire because they have no idea how to manage their millions).
All those things correlate to coming from a wealthier family, except athletic ability. The degree itself, however, is all too often completely irrelevant to what the grad ends up doing in life (and certainly is in the NFL).
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The degree itself, however, is all too often completely irrelevant to what the grad ends up doing in life
The specific degree is irrelevant for most people, but having one is necessary because the lack of one is used to disqualify applicants in order to reduce the pool of applications which must be reviewed. You can't fix this without setting standards for what positions you can require a degree for, which isn't realistic. Also, if you did that, HR departments would use some even dumber metric for which applications to reject up front to shrink that number.
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That's still equating getting hired with being successful after being hired, which are not the same thing. (Plus, of course, the advantage of meeting the "right people" at college, which has nothing to do with getting a degree, and everything to do with "it's not what you know, but who you know.")
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There are also a lot of smart NFL players as well that make wonderful business decisions after they retire from the NFL. Here's a short list. https://www.collegeraptor.com/... [collegeraptor.com]
But sure, they are all idiots, right.
Re: Lowering the Bar. (Score:2)
If college graduates earn more, why can't they pay their student loans?
Do college graduate Starbucks baristas earn more than Starbucks baristas without college degrees?
I suspect plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics and welders earn more than many college graduates 10 years after high school graduation.
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After 10 years? Sure, 20, I doubt it. 40, not a chance.
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They have plenty to do with getting hired. Plenty of companies won’t even consider someone without a degree.
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That's because, like you, plenty of companies have people hiring that equate getting hired in a job with being successful at it.
And they're not the same thing.
I know that's a popular old man thing (Score:1, Troll)
My kid had an order of magnitude more homework and classwork and then I did. They were also expected to do extensive on the job training which we paid for. Of course that meant they came out of college ready to work with little or no training necessary beyond being shown where to work. Thi
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But I can tell you right now having put a kid through college relatively recently, relatively it's going on 9 years since their freshman year, that no, the bar has not been lowered. It has been cranked through the roof My kid had an order of magnitude more homework and classwork and then I did. They were also expected to do extensive on the job training which we paid for. Of course that meant they came out of college ready to work with little or no training necessary beyond being shown where to work. This did not translate into higher wages of course because why would it? But the thing that really stands out is that when they needed to get into their 300 level courses despite having a 3.9 GPA they still had a in-person interview. I remember buying them interview clothes for it because for all intents and purposes it was a job interview. The only difference being they were being tested not for the ability to do the job but for whether or not they had enough financial support from their parents to make it through 2 years without resorting to working. Also thanks for letting us all know you're a fascist with that last line. There was a little tiny microscopic bit of doubt in your Boomer screed but you dispelled all of it. Ironically you are probably Christian and by your own dogma going to go to hell. Eye of the needle and all that.
A) You're talking about college, not public education.
B) Are you as mentally defective as you let on? I stated what we've been seeing happening, which I find patently absurd and abusive on a society-wide level, and you think that makes me a fascist? Did you forget to double-check the AI output before posting it up this time?
Re:I know that's a popular old man thing (Score:4, Informative)
Re: I know that's a popular old man thing (Score:3)
gives the illusion of working towards "equality/equity" without actually providing anything beyond a $100k piece of paper they can hang up at their station at McDonalds.
I'm not sure I follow, are you saying if the education isn't difficult to the point of being exclusive, it isn't worth anything?
Are you equating the value of the paper to the difficulty of obtaining it, or how exclusive it is, both? Are you putting the value of the paper ahead of the quality of the education, because I don't see how quality relates to difficulty or how many others have it.
It really does sound like you're just talking about a more valuable piece of paper, not an education.
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Of course money is more important then education. The point of getting the education is to make more money then those who don't get the education. You can educate yourself with books from the library, but the piece of paper is what tends to open doors, not the education.
Obviously, not all career paths are the same. STEM you actually need to know stuff but it is still much easier to get a job with the paperwork and not just the knowledge.
I'd rather be a rich idiot then a poor genius.
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The bar DEFINITELY has been lowered for admissions and a LOT of majors. It's two-fold plan for the schools, it keeps attendance up and the $$$ money flowing in, and also gives the illusion of working towards "equality/equity" without actually providing anything beyond a $100k piece of paper they can hang up at their station at McDonalds.
Fields of study like engineering and computer science are definitely a lot of work though. Education, social sciences, business, performing arts, communication (some of the most popular majors) are essentially adult day care.
Whether the "bar" has changed over the years is unknown and intentionally opaque. What we can look at is the number of matriculated students, which has both increased and decreased over the past two decades, all while the total number of high school graduates has increased. In near future, the number of teenagers will decrease, and either university student populations will decrease or the "bar" will have to be lowered.
Re: Lowering the Bar. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Lowering the Bar. [But whose bar?] (Score:3)
Mostly I agree with you about who is driving this though you weren't clear if you regard it as a problem... My take is that given that we are in the middle of the Singularity and we humans are becoming increasingly replaceable by AI, then I'm not sure that it matters much if we become dumber on top of AI becoming smarter. MUCH smarter. And how.
I would like to see a better evaluation of the degree to which the test has been dumbed down. Obvious approach would be give the old and new tests to two randomly sel
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Mostly I agree with you about who is driving this though you weren't clear if you regard it as a problem...
I would hope that I wouldn't have to point out that lowering the bar on education is an overall bad thing. I forgot I'm writing to a group of people that have experienced that bar lowering in real time.
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Thanks for the clarification, though I am not sure we can agree on the definition of "education". I don't know if the important parts have bars to jump over?
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Thanks for the clarification, though I am not sure we can agree on the definition of "education". I don't know if the important parts have bars to jump over?
That could lead to an entire other discussion of how everything is framed as competition, so of course there are bars to jump over. And a side-discussion of whether that "competition is all" mindset is a healthy one or an obsession that leads to self-destructive tendencies.
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Now it sounds like you're talking about addiction, but the key problem with addiction is that the craving that can never be satisfied. I could actually make an argument that I'm addicted to reading?
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People who know a lot more about this than I do have told me that the SAT was already made easier in the 90s, switching from what was basically an IQ test to something that was easier to improve on by memorization and study. I can't vouch for that being true, but as I said they know a lot more about it than I do.
But when colleges want to bring in as many kids as possible for those lovely student loan $$$ and the smart kids are opting out because they don't need a degree when they have the Internet, it's ine
Marketing to wrong People (Score:2)
Why wouldn't we also lower the bar on SATs?
The reason for not lowering it is because they are marketing the SATs to the wrong people. The SATs should not be marketted to students, they should be marketted to universities. Students take exams because they need them to get into the university of their choice, not because they are easy. If a large number of univiersities require SATs then students will take them.
Making the exam easier makes it of less value to universities so this seems like very short-term thinking that will mean fewer universitie
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Why wouldn't we also lower the bar on SATs?
The reason for not lowering it is because they are marketing the SATs to the wrong people.
The bar on the SATs was lowered significantly in 1995. When the SAT was started in 1926, the average scores for the math and English sections were calibrated to be 500 each, for a composite score of 1000. Over the decades, the average composite score dropped to around 900. So, in 1995, the score calculation was "recentered" [wikipedia.org] to immediately bring the average score back to 1000. That's why the number of 1600 scores shot up into the hundreds per year instead of the several dozen before the recentering.
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SAT Sucks (Score:3, Informative)
From what I saw of the SAT I formed the impression that its sole purpose was to reward kids who happened to be good at that style of test taking. The format was frankly weird and a race against time more than a display of depth of knowledge.
It seemed to me to be a test focussed on the glory of itself
Re:SAT Sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree. Life is not a two hour exam. Rote memorization is pointless, as any engineer will tell you. You always have the ability to go look something up for two reasons: 1) it frees up your mind to think about implementation and the bigger picture and 2) you won't have the problem of misremembering something. Sure, your mind naturally remembers stuff that you use or are exposed to on a regular basis but you can't force it to remember something that you don't use. When I was a TA, I would see engineering students that aced a test but couldn't design, build, and demonstrate a project to save their life and vice versa. Which one would YOU hire? To this day, I'm baffled by universities requirements for doctoral candidates for engineering. You have to take this qualifying exam that essentially expects you to have remembered ever course you ever took from freshman year. So what? That sure as hell doesn't make them a better teacher. It's the ones who have worked outside of academia that make the best professors. It's like taking martial arts classes. Ooo, look, you can do all these "forms" but you can't defend yourself in a street fight.
Re:SAT Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Not every PhD program structures their qualifying exam properly. But, a correctly-executed one is most definitely a street fight.
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My PhD interview (maybe this dates it, and it was not in America) was with my prospective PI and was more like a very probing chat with a fellow nerd. The we went for a pint. That was quite hard because I'd been out on the lash the night before.
Anyhow decades ago and water/beer under the bridge. Interviewers here are, well, more like interviews not the hazing rituals that seems more popular in America. But we don't have quals. You apply and you get in or don't.
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Rote memorization is pointless, as any engineer will tell you.
It's not pointless. It's just one portion of a complete skill set.
It's how you learned to read.
Re:SAT Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
What? That's just crazy talk?
Setting aside the sarcasm... being a strong test-taker isn't a guarantee of future success. For sure, some people are poor test-takers and go on to beat the odds. But, the hard truth, is that strong-test-takers exhibit a combination of ability to handle stress, ability to focus on demand, and ability to think quickly and clearly at the same time, which is a pretty compelling combination of skills that frequently translate into success. It doesn't equal success in all cases. But you're a fool to totally dismiss the utility of testing to measure individual capability and future potential.
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In other news, professional basketball and football teams have all stopped testing their players for running speed. Because, let's be frank, all a running test does is reward people who excel in races against time.
Do they even? That would be crazy. If you use a running speed test to admit players to your basketball, football, baseball, hockey, soccer team or whatever, you'd have a team of runners.
Now I don't know when was the last time you've been to a professional basketball race, but you wouldn't mistake them for a track team. When you score a point in the baseball net, it's called a run, you literally run to score, I mean after you do this other little thing with a stick that I'm sure all runners can do. Even THOS
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In other news, professional basketball and football teams have all stopped testing their players for running speed. Because, let's be frank, all a running test does is reward people who excel in races against time.
Do they even? That would be crazy. If you use a running speed test to admit players to your basketball, football, baseball, hockey, soccer team or whatever, you'd have a team of runners.
Pro sports leagues definitely test for speed as well as other metrics at their sports combines. Speed is not the only thing measured because speed is not the only desirable trait. Also, one-time tests for specific types of performance are essentially single samples and have different levels of accuracy. And these tests are don't replicate on-field conditions and are therefore just proxy guesses.
Drafting and signing pro athletes is very much like the hi-tech interview process in that you get a very small
SAT is Objective Measure (Score:2)
The fact that it's an objective measure is important. Students can manipulate grades. Some will beg and plead with teachers to turn those B's into A's. Some can just pay off low-paid teachers. Some students can go t
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From what I saw of the SAT I formed the impression that its sole purpose was to reward kids who happened to be good at that style of test taking. The format was frankly weird and a race against time more than a display of depth of knowledge.
It seemed to me to be a test focussed on the glory of itself
Well, there are perhaps several purposes for the SAT. First, the College Board earns over a $1 billion, and the CEO earns over $2 million a year, even though it's ostensibly a non-profit. Then, there's the SAT test preparation industry which collects tens of billions each year. Money is definitely a key purpose of the SAT, at least for some people.
The key reason for the existence of the SAT is that it's perhaps the least easy of all admissions criteria to manipulate. GPA grading scales and criteria are
SAT is the second best method for predicting colle (Score:2)
first is high school grades, but it is nearly impossible to equate or handicap different high schools.
Equalizing (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a news story from Washington DC, where the daughter of a Pentagon staffer had a 4.0 GPA in high school, then went in to military college and had to take remedial algebra and trig classes, as math at her high school topped out at basic algebra and geometry.
My high school math curriculum ended with pre-calc, or intro to calc in the advanced class, which wasn't even AP.
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Those Maths are still important because they teach people how to think through problems. This is a skill that can translate to other fields that have nothing to do with Math.
Re:Equalizing (Score:4, Insightful)
My nephew is a Sophomore this year in a competitive engineering program.
He showed up with AP calc BC completed plus a bunch of other AP and dual enrollment classes that his high school encouraged.
Other kids are starting off in college with pre-calc. No chance they are finishing that degree in four years.
Having a higher standard to enter college is perhaps what allows some countries to shorten their programs to three years.
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I'm a bit skeptical of this story. The Pentagon is in Northern Virginia, which has plenty of highly competitive schools where taking 10+ AP exams is quite normal. What could have happened is that this Pentagon staffer's kid just took the easiest classes in school to cruise to a 4.0. I really doubt there are many high schools (if any) in NoVa that top out at pre-calc.
Living in DC and working at the Pentagon? (Score:2)
Seems entirely reasonable if you want your kids to have the full urban experience. Remember; there's a metro that goes out from the city to the Pentagon
https://maps-washington-dc.com... [maps-washington-dc.com]
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Yeah, I used to live there. But very few parents voluntarily send their kids to DC public schools. Someone who is a Pentagon official wouldn't HAVE to live in D.C. proper, and indeed it would be pretty inconvenient/expensive compared to living closer to work.
Location (Score:2)
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Is it really? (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember back in the day thinking that if I could have just hired somebody to tutor my kid to get a better score on the SAT they might have scored a few of those hard to get scholarships saving me money in the long run.
I was still reeling from the effects of 2008 and a couple of family members getting sick in the American healthcare system so I did not have that money. The result was my kid got a slightly above averag
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Or is it just predicting which parents have enough money to pay for an SAT tutor?
Oh, please. A well-educated person should be able to get a perfect score on the SAT, with staying awake while taking it being the biggest problem. No tutors required. SAT simply distinguishes between parents who care about education and the ones who don't.
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A real test needs to be like the gaokao, where nobody ever got the perfect score, or CSAT from South Korea where maybe a handful of students get the perfect score each year.
Re:SAT is the second best method for predicting co (Score:4, Insightful)
Like the SAT itself, high school grades have been lowering the bar for decades. When I went to high school in the 80's, the AVERAGE grade was a C. If you got A's, you were quite good at school. These days, you practically get an A for showing up and doing your homework, even if you don't actually do it as expected.
So I'm not sure high school grades are a good predictor of college success.
Relative score matters, absolute score not so much (Score:2)
The major use of the SAT is as a single standard to compare students from disparate schools.
If Student A beats student B 1550-1450 rather than 1380-1250 it mostly doesn't matter. The most important thing you learn from the scores is that student A is stronger doing multiple choice Math and English tests.
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Re: Relative score matters, absolute score not so (Score:2)
Interestingly, Mensa used to accept SATs for membership scores. They no longer do (since 1994). Mine would've gotten me in, but I wanted to test in (to challenge myself) and did so.
Didn't stay long. Had a boring and unimportant life experience, and wanted something with a broader community. Others' experience may be different.
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Reading (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reading (Score:4, Insightful)
My daughter is a senior in high school and thankfully has several "real" books on the reading list besides the ones I assign for screen time. Yes, in my fascist household my 17-year-old daughter still has to read assigned (by me) books for screen time on a 1:1 ratio. My son did the same thing until he turned 18. The books have included Neuromancer, Plato's Republic, John Muir's memoirs, Dune, and a bunch of other stuff they have (mostly) enjoyed. Both have grown up with, and say they are grateful for, absolute bans from social media. They are horrified by the effects it has on their peers.
There is a broader reverse Flynn Effect that has been observed over the last 15-20 years. Gen Alpha never had a chance.
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Just the first book in the series was required, I hope.
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Just the first book in the series was required, I hope.
Yes! I myself had several false starts with the Dune Messiah and Children of Dune going back to 1980 or so. I finally read them in the 2000s after watching the SciFi Channel's follow-on "Dune" series.
Same thing with Gibson: Neuromancer is excellent and holds up really well (as does more than half the anthology Burning Chrome that preceded it), but Count Zero hasn't aged as gracefully and wasn't as good in the first place. I recall actively disliking Mona Lisa Overdrive when it came out, so neither of the
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But Fox told me college is for suckers (Score:2, Funny)
Who needs college anymore? Dear Leader says we’ll all be able to earn six-figure incomes building iPhones as soon as Tim Apple opens the US factories!
Bad systems. (Score:2)
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The root cause of the problem (Score:2)
For some, college is a valuable tool for training the mind. These people love learning and work hard to learn as much as they can
For others, college is a useless hurdle they need to jump over in order to get a diploma which they believe will be a key to a good job. These people put in minimal effort. slouching through college socializing, binge drinking and cheating on exams.
Unfortunately, these dumfuks often end up in positions of power and work to make college even easier for others like them
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excuses (Score:4, Insightful)
"...then the pandemic hit. As in-person exams became impractical, hundreds of schools dropped their testing requirements." which was hilariously pointless for young people, by the by.
And let's be clear, lots of schools were denigrating and trying to devalue the SAT/ACT tests because they absolutely got in the way of admissions practices that were quite openly bringing in kids according to skin color (dark brown GOOD! white, yellow, or south asian brown BAD!) with significantly worse performance scores - attributed, naturally, to racial 'bias' in SAT/ACT testing.*
As this practice has been found to be legally unjustifiable it seems the standardized testing companies can get back into the college's toolboxes by skewing their tests to get those test results into a "close enough" normative curve where canny admissions officers can go back to their former practices.
"Not a single child tested proficient in math in 67 Illinois schools. For reading, itâ(TM)s 32 schools."** - so lets make those math and reading tests a LOT easier, shall we?
*there absolutely IS an economic bias in formalized test results but the bias skews along ECONOMIC not ethnic lines - wealthy kids from stable homes (of any ethnicity) do much better due to available resources like test prep. But the ADMISSIONS data didn't fracture along plausible economic lines, it's almost purely racial for whatever motivation you care to speculate.
**https://wirepoints.org/education-fail-not-a-single-child-tested-proficient-in-math-in-67-illinois-schools-for-reading-its-32-schools-wirepoints-special-report/
As trump has said (Score:1)
He loves the poorly educated.
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When I was a kid, Trump would have been a middle-of-the-road Democrat, talking about protecting the rights of American workers against megacorps and foreign competition.
Now he's "far right" because the Democrats have gone so far left that 1980s Democrats are considered Literally Hitler. Trump's tarrifs are evil because they take jobs from Mexicans and given them to Americans or something.
Lumberjack math problem (Score:5, Funny)
1950:
A lumberjack sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of this price. What is his profit?
1960 (traditional math): A lumberjack sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of
production is 4/5 of this price, or in other words $80. What is his profit?
1970 (new math):
A lumberjack exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100, and each element is worth $1. Make 100 dots representing the elements of set M. The set C is a subset of set M, of cardinality 80. What is the cardinality of the set P of profits, if P is the difference set MC?
1980 (equal opportunity math):
A lumberjack sells a truckload of wood for $100. His or her cost of production is $80, and his or her profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
1990 (outcome based education):
By cutting down beautiful forest trees, a lumberperson makes $20. What do you think of his way of making a living? In your group, discuss how the forest birds and squirrels feel, and write an essay about it.
1995 (entrepreneurial math):
By laying off 402 of its lumberjacks, a company improves its stock price from $80 to $100. How much capital gain per share does the CEO make by exercising his stock options at $80? Assume capital gains are no longer taxed, because this encourages investment.
1998 (motivational math):
A logging company exports its wood-finishing jobs to its Indonesian subsidiary and lays off the corresponding half of its US workers (the higher-paid half). It clear-cuts 95% of the forest, leaving the rest for the spotted owl, and lays off all its remaining US workers. It tells the workers that the spotted owl is responsible for the absence of fellable trees and lobbies Congress for exemption from the Endangered Species Act. Congress instead exempts the company from all federal regulation. What is the return on investment of the lobbying?
2010: ...
El hachero vende un camion carga por $100. La cuesta de production es
Lumberjack Inflation Problem (Score:2)
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To follow reality, you could have just started lopping off parts of 1990. First drop the essay, those are racist. Then, replace the group conversation with "tweet your feelings". Then drop the group all together, move to zoom. Then, drop everything and just tell the students how socialism has improved education over the last 75 years.
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Mod parent funnier and thanks for your effort.
This isn't about the pandemic (Score:3)
(I worked in the edtech industry and higher ed for about fifteen years before totally burning out.)
This is the natural end game of the horrible way we've structured education for decades.
When you pump public money though grants and guaranteed loans into a system of quasi-private universities, they are incentivized to take every student they possibly can.
For decades universities have been trying to admit everybody, while maintaining that they are elite and valuable precisely because they don't admit everybody. So overtime, grades and tests have become more and more of a sham. They are now truly teetering on the verge of being completely meaningless.
Even worse than the system being dumbed down, is how biased the system we're left with is. The more nebulous the grades get, the more they really just become a reflection of how much your teachers like you. White girl students dominate a K-12 system that is in turn dominated by white woman teachers, weird. Probably no connection.
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Wish I had mod points today because that's the most insightful and informative post on this story.
The more we expand college, the more it has to be dumbed down.
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I blame Vietnam. Or, rather how that generation turned higher education into a way to dodge the draft. As soon as the purpose of higher education was something other than education, the system turned into poop. Especially since what it was turned into was a place for young people to get wasted while avoiding responsibility.
End result, college is where you go to "find yourse
Is it not standardized? (Score:2)
I'm skeptical of the claim that these changes to the SAT represent "dumbing down" of the test. The SAT is a standardized test intended to produce a distributional bell curve of results. If you suddenly dumbed down the SAT, you'd have far too many perfect scores and big score cliffs due to the high number of high scores.
It's true that the SAT has been recentered over the years such that a given absolute score isn't necessarily comparable. But a 99th percentile score from 20 years ago should be pretty equival
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This is true, but the means of achieving this comparability requires us to equate the tests -- what this means is that each completed test contains some items which are not necessarily counted towards the current score, but were instead used upon a previous exam. Then, the current test performance is linked to the set of anchor item performance (simplest form of which could be linear regression), and then a similar linear function maps the scores of the typical anchor item responses on the previous exams to
Well, you can't have it both ways (Score:2)
Out of one side of your mouth, you want all groups to have the same outcomes, but out of the other side, you don't want to dumb down the SAT.
I'm afraid you can't have both ...
Idiocracy ho! (Score:2)
and it's ALWAYS been that way!
It's all good, I'm sure my future doctor (Score:2)
will just ask chatGPT what's wrong with me. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
refining the sensitivity of the test (Score:2)
It's important to have a test that is sensitive enough to detect vibe coders.
Take the Ryan Walters Test! (Score:2)
Ryan Walters has a test [kosu.org] you will need to take if you are from a "woke" state and want to teach in Oklahoma.
It was developed in conjunction with Prager "University".
How low can it go before it's limbo? (Score:2)